#InternetOfThings, #Drones, #Robots, and #Music

Posted on November 16th, 2016

Marco and Jack Parisi, Artists in Residence at ROLI. ROLI, a London-based music technology startup, is changing the way people make music. ROLI has just launched BLOCKS, a modular music studio, that will be featured at all Apple stores globally this holiday season. ROLI has raised $43M from FirstMark, Balderton and Foundry Group.

David Lyman, Founder and CEO of BetterView (drone marketplace for aerial photography jobs)

Use Google’sAPI to look up locations. Then check if inside a geofence.

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David Lyman@BetterView captures and analyzes drone data. They have analyzed 4200 rooftops for insurance companies. Experts currently analyze the images. They are moving toward deep learning. The main drivers of the increased use of drones are Regulation, hardware, experience.

He sees a longer term opportunity: 5mm workers that should have a drone in their trucks – fence installers, HVAC maintenance.

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Vaughn @Temboo: SAAS to connect actuators and sensors to the cloud, gave several examples of IoT in industry:

Most of the cost is in integration, so he is looking for systems that are configurable by end users (simpler integration) . Examples include: Universal robotics (UR5), ReThink robotics (Sawyer), Franka produce collaborative robotics that users can program.

He gave some examples of industrial robotic applications:

Robots as a service – a machine that thins the small lettuce plants. Farmers can rent when they need it.

Navii is used by Lowes to tell customers were to find items in inventory.

He sees the key is having machines learning to handle variation as manual labor is hard to scale.

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Finally, Roli, demonstrated a music technology that increases the flexibility and capabilities of accomplished musicians while being easy enough for beginners to create their own music.

Their original device in 2012 replaced a keyboard with a continuous sensitive surface: The Seaboard. They are introducing a more general devices (the block) that has the flexibility to play the sounds of multiple instruments, but in a simple and elegant package.

HardwiredNYC: #hardware startups, #drones, #VC, #AutonomousVehicles

Posted on May 12th, 2016

There were six presentations starting with two brief introductions to companies and their products. Three speakers talked about products and investing in hardware. Adam Jonas closed the evening by describing a roadmap for the future of cars.

In the first presentation, George Popescu@lampix talked about their product which projects a desktop image on any surface so that surface becomes a computer screen, a shared documents or piece of paper, etc. A projector shines an image on the surface making the surface a touch screen, drawing pad, etc. to view, edit or share materials.

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Next, David @samlabs showed physical devices that can linked to each other using a visual interface. In this way push buttons can control lights, motors, tweets, cameras, etc. creating ways a non-programmer can prototype a hardware device.

Some configurations are monitoring the taking of medication from a medication box, squeezing a pillow to send a message, counting twitter tweets and activate motors when a hashtag is tweeted.

Jonathan Frankel @nucleuslife.com (Intercom system which connects anyone to anyone, anywhere using a tablet like a home intercom.) spoke about how to increase the odds of success as a hardware startup:

Cash flow > BOM . need to manage growth as well as the financing arrangements

Hire DB / sales early – crowdfunding may not work, so you need to start selling early

Carpe diem – small window of opportunities. Seizing them makes the difference.

Tips

In-person > video > phone > email

Get out more – network, network, network

Put away the NDAs – being open gets you feedback and partners

Who is on your mailing list? – follow-up with selected people on your email list

Don’t work insanely hard – you need to have the emotional fortitude to overcome the valleys. So take some time off. Okay to mix business and pleasure.

NucleusLife elected to do a private presale (in favor of crowdfunding) since they wanted the ability to brand and control the entire experience start to finish. They also felt that their customer base was different from the early adopters

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Next, Matt Turck interviewed Avidan Ross @Routeventures (seeds hardware startups). His interests are in physical products, with the emphasis on being an enabler in disrupting established businesses: they especially like low cost robotics and connectivity. They invest in only 6 to 8 deals per year so they can have lots of contact and input with each startup.

Their investments back their belief that robots are best when working in conjunction with humans

Shapertools – handtools that assist the user when doing precision work

Plethera – software that works with 3-d plots (solidworks) to help you optimize the milling process.

They avoid one-off IoT products and hardware whose only advantage is lower production costs. They instead look for long term value and want to avoid the future struggle to maintain margins as technology and competition change over time. In the same vein, they want to price appropriately and don’t believe that products using Arduino’s or Raspberry Pi’s are scalable.

Design is important, but not core to IoT. Function comes before looks.

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Dan Burton @ Dronebase talked about the rapidly evolving use of drones and their changing uses: real estate, mining inventory management, construction monitoring, etc. For instance, only within the past year has drone pilot become a profession.

Drone capabilities are increasing rapidly as a new generation of drones is created every 6 months. This has lead to the same dynamics as in smartphones, where retail products are often at the cutting edge lead by DJI. This means that most professional work is done with off-the shelf drones.

The systems making up a drone: software, gimbals, cameras, autopilots are all getting better exponentially. Battery technology lags.

Currently top end drones are accurate to 2 cm. One of the most promising next steps would be a light-weight Lidar system to get accuracy within 1mm.

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Adam Jonas @MorganStanley gave a roadmap of how cars might evolve. He considered two dimensions:

driver driven vs. autonomous

owned vs car sharing

Based on these two dichotomies, he sees a rapid transition from owned-driver driven to shared-autonomous model of car usage. With this transition comes a change in point of view from number of vehicles sold to the number of miles traversed in a year. This transition will also create many economic winners and losers, but it is less clear who wins and who loses. Even with a transition from gas to electric cars, it is unclear whether the world-wide demand for gasoline increases (more mileage) or decreases (greater efficiency in energy usage).